Daniel of DailyBlogTips had recently posted about Downforeveryoneorjustme service that is simple check is website is alive. Way too simple and way too unreliable in my opinion but it had link to another service – Uptime Party.
What it does
Free service gets you monitoring single server every hour. You can choose what exactly to monitor like web or ping (or more specific stuff) and enter email address for notifications.
They are very willing to sell more (of course) but I wasn’t very interested.
Notifications
You get short email with event and service that became unavailable. One more when it goes back online. So far I had no downtimes but it reacted once when site was loading slow for few minutes.
Overall
Simple to setup and use. Free plan lacks everything but the core feature. Still gets task done. I only wish some simple stats were included as well.
That’s a good service if you run mission-critical websites or websites for customers. If your customers keep saying their website is down, at least you have something to prove it isn’t ;)
@Ben
Yep, simple and freebie. I wish I could receive emails from it like SMS but my mobile operator had shutdown that option because of spam. :( I totally dislike to check email from mobile.
I must admit having updates directly on your mobile is a really nice way to know when your website is down.
By the way, I have a favicon now ;)
@Ben
>By the way, I have a favicon now ;)
Took you some time… :)
Thanks for the tip, I added it to my list to try out. So far I’ve been using http://mon.itor.us/ and http://www.siteuptime.com/.
@Jacob
Thanks for visit and links. :) I am following your blog on group writing for some time.
I have trouble with non-working links on monitor one. Siteuptime looks interesting and with bit more functional free plan than Uptime Party.
Great find. this service will help us get whether a site is up or not…
@Nihar
Just don’t rely on it too much, 60 minutes between scans in free version = not very often. Good freebie for beginners but large sites with heavy traffic should go for paid or self-hosted services in my opinion.
Our company offers a site uptime checker with SMS alerts, so you get instant notifications of downtime.
Please see http://websitemonitor.sms.eu.sk/en/signup.php
@Dan Anos
Care to provide some details on that?.. I don’t see actual site or something around that signup page.